1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to recovery management, and more particularly to systems and methods for organizing and mapping data.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, recovery management has been overseen by various systems that keep track of data being written to a storage medium. Recovery management may be necessary to recover data that has been altered by a disk crash, a virus, erroneous deletions, overwrites, and so on. Numerous other reasons are cited by companies and individuals for requiring access to data as it existed at one point in time.
Back-up methods for storing data are necessary before the data can be recovered. Back-up methods may include the activity of copying files or databases so that they will be preserved in case of equipment failure or other catastrophe. Some processes may involve copying backup files from backup media to hard disk in order to return data to its original condition. Other techniques may include an ability to periodically copy contents of all or a designated portion of data from the data's main storage device to a cartridge device so the data will not be lost in the event of a hard disk crash.
Backup procedures, such as those described above, require a great deal of processing power from the server performing the backups. For this reason, backup procedures may be offloaded from a server so that the time ordinarily devoted to backup functions can be used to carry out other server tasks. For example, in some environments, an intelligent agent may be utilized to offload the backup procedures. The intelligent agent may take a “snapshot” of a computer's data at a specific time so that if future changes cause a problem, the system and data may be restored to the way they were before the changes were made.
Once copies of the data have been made in some manner, data recovery may be utilized to recover the data using the copies. Data recovery seeks to return the data to a state before particular changes were made to the data. Thus, the data may be recovered to different points in time, depending upon the state of the data a user may want to access. However, locating the data to the different points in time can be a long and arduous process.
The user may utilize the recovered data for a variety of tasks, such as studying the data to determine possible causes of software program errors or bugs. However, different users often cannot readily locate and utilize data recovered from other users. Further, determining how data created by other users may relate to other data is frequently a difficult or impossible task.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method for organizing and mapping data.